Skip to main content

Forever Pure, directed by Maya Zinshtein, focuses on the politically mired Beitar Jersualem FC soccer club and its xenophobic character.

In the long and benighted history of sports and race, 1936 is usually remembered as the year that Adolf Hitler's hideous dream of demonstrating Aryan athletic superiority was smashed at the Berlin Olympics by the African-American track-and-field star Jesse Owens.

But that year also marked the founding of another sports enterprise grounded in ugly nationalism, the Israeli soccer club Beitar Jerusalem FC. And as a depressing new documentary showing at the Toronto International Film Festival illustrates, Beitar remains an inherently xenophobic enterprise, cheered by its fans as "the most racist team in the country." Eighty years after its founding, Beitar is the only Israeli team to have never signed an Arab player.

In Forever Pure – the title is from the racist chants of a small yet vocal group of fans known as La Famila – director Maya Zinshtein follows Beitar during the 2012-13 season when, mired in the middle of the Israeli Premier League standings, the team adds two Chechen players to its ranks. Their nationality is unimportant; what makes them anathema to some Beitar fans is that they are Muslim.

On assignment for an Israeli TV station, Zinshtein followed the players for their first four days and then filed a report. "I was shocked," she said this week, a few hours before she was due to fly home from Toronto to Tel Aviv. "They were just football players that came to play." Her cameras caught their reception: the bewilderment in the other players' faces, the harsh invective from the fans as the Chechens take the field for the first time.

Still, she believed there would be a happy ending, so she kept filming. "The chairman told me: You'll see, in two weeks, they'll score some goals, it will be fine. And I thought, I'm going to film a story about how football connects people." She laughs, a dark and bitter chortle.

As the season rolls on, the chairman reveals to Zinshtein's cameras that the police have instructed him on how check the underside of his car for bombs. Fans chant, "Our captain is a son of a bitch." (They don't mean it as a compliment.) The club's offices are hit with a Molotov cocktail.

Beitar was already a toxic stew of agendas. In 2007, Arcadi Gaydamak, an Israeli-Russian arms dealer (who also holds Canadian citizenship) bought the club, even though he had little interest in soccer. With such a large and passionate fan base, he explains to Zinshtein, "It is a very interesting propaganda tool." He invested upward of $100-million on the club, and untold millions more on social causes, with the intention of becoming mayor of Jerusalem. Fans pledged their undying love and loyalty. But when Gaydamak ran for office in 2008, he won a mere 3.6 per cent of the vote.

His support for the club withered, and the fans grew restive.

They were naturally suspicious of those in power. Many of the contemporary Israeli sports teams grew out of political movements, Zinshtein notes, and they retain their founding ideologies. "Beitar was a youth political movement, a national movement, that out of it came the Likud, the right-wing party in Israel," she says. "When you are a Beitar fan, it says a lot of things about you. It says what your political views are, what's your ideology. Usually, it also says your social level."

Beitar fans, she says, self-identify as "the unprivileged. The amazing thing is that the right-wing is in power in Israel for 30 years, but they still see themselves as the unprivileged, and the oppressed. They always feel they're the underdog, even when they're in power. And of course the leaders – it's very good to have masses that feel they're unprivileged and they're underdogs, because you can use these feelings." For years, politicians such as Benjamin Netanyahu tacitly supported Beitar's hard-right bloc, then finally pronounced themselves shocked only when the extremism really got out of control and violent.

The story had an especially personal resonance for Zinshtein, 35. When she was 10, she and her family emigrated from Novosibirsk, Russia, and settled on a kibbutz. "I needed to make my way into this small society," she says. "So I did everything: I learned all the songs in Hebrew, I had perfect Hebrew, I started to wear clothes like them. And they never accepted me. I was coming back again and again and again, trying to become part of this, and I failed."

"Maybe it was naive to think that, if you work hard, people will open their hearts and will accept you, in a society that doesn't want you. So, to see the Chechens try to be accepted, and turned down, it was the same thing that happened to me. But you know, we're always trying to fix our past."

Follow related authors and topics

Authors and topics you follow will be added to your personal news feed in Following.

Interact with The Globe